The Seventh Hound - a Nightmarish Inspiration

Originally, I had decided on a seven-strong Hound unit, with Karanak as a unit upgrade - check out one of my earlier blog entries. However, things move on as they always do, we get a new Codex and Karanak is not a unit upgrade anymore, but an HQ choice. This means I wanted to add a seventh hound so as to have a seven-strong unit, even in cases where I do not want to buy Karanak as an extra Herald.

After playing around with some ideas, I decided to take inspiration from a fellow blogger - or in this case blogerette - namely Nightmare/Ana and her great blog Gardens of Hecate. I particularly liked the following of her creations:

So I intended to go down this path, and combine a hound body with an elongated, equine neck and a horse head. Needless to say, one crazy converting session later, the initial concept had been completely turned around:

I used the body of a Confro Centaur as a basis, and as the model was rather old, it had already lost a hoof. So I simply cut off the second hoof too and replaced them with Dire Wolf legs. The whole thing still needs some green stuff, but is otherwise finished (for the time being).

This uncertainty and sudden inspiration bursts are what really makes me enjoy converting so much.

Plaguebearers... WIP

Now, for my most recent creations.

The big problem I have with my army is that it is still not legal, because I don't have two Troops choices yet. I do possess 7 half-painted Plaguebearers, but under the new Codex this isn't enough anymore, all Troops units have gone up to 10-strong as a minimum size.

So, what do I need? Three more Plaguebearers. Here they are.

And the half-painted lot so far:

Irisse the Fury

Next up, a conversion for a Nurglized Slaanesh Herald on Steed I also did some weeks ago. The model uses a Rackham Confrontation dragon (!) as a basis, and is somewhat tall as a consequence. Actually, it's more in the range of a Daemon Prince sizewise, but I don't really care.

I simply like models that are obscenely exaggerated and over the top =D
One reason why I went for Daemons in the first place.

Behold, Irisse the Fury:

Ëylon Gnosis, the Apostate

Alright, currently I just can't motivate myself to paint anything, so I figured I'll just settle on converting minis for the time being. I have been rather productive in this regard, and now it seems about time to show off some of my recent creations.

I'll kick off with a big model I have converted a couple weeks ago already: Ëylon Gnosis the Apostate. The idea is that he is a Keeper of Secrets who now serves Nurgle together with the rest of the Honoured Decaying Mother's court.

The model is based on a Mierce miniature, with some parts taken from a Maulerfiend and some Ork Dread bitz. I am very pleased with the pose of the finished miniature, and its mere size is impressive.

Treatises on the Empyrean: ChainsawDaemonEngines, Part I - Decay

Recently, when strolling through my favourite blogs on the Blogosphere, I came to realize something important. I had started my blog not only to present my conversions and paintjobs, but also to write about some of the topics in our hobby that I find particularly interesting. But up until now, I had not done any of that.

So time to change that, I guess.

I wanted to kick this off with some sort of "designer's notes" on my current army, the ChainsawDaemonEngines. As I am aware of the repelling effect of the "wall of text" syndrome, especially on the internet, I decided to break this topic up into several parts.

About two years ago, I had finally decided to return to 40k after a hiatus of several years, and I was deliberating over which army I was going to collect. I wanted something rather different, with a strong narrative and a very individual, personal touch. I wanted to turn the army into an ambitious converting/modelling/painting project, as these are the things in the hobby that I find most interesting and fulfilling nowadays. Performance on the battlefield was deemed unimportant, even undesirable. I have found with many games (both tabletop and computer) that battles are more interesting and challenging if armies only contain a small number of very powerful (read: overpowered) units and many more regular or basic units. So any considerations about effectiveness or tournament-abilities quickly went out of the window.

I wanted an army that I found inspiring, where I could find a theme and then stick to it, play with it, alter it. After a longer process of elimination, I ended up with Chaos Daemons, more specifically Nurgle Daemons. As I have already mentioned in previous posts, a big influence on this decision was a) the Nurgle Daemon Prince model and b) my idea to combine the Soul Grinder with the Skaven Hell Pit Abomination. This gave me the first ingredient:

## DECAY ##

  

Blowflies of Nurgle

Slowly, but steadily, the servants of Nurgle march on. In this case, however, they don't actually march but rather fly in on fetid wings. Or somesuch. The blowflies are my version of Gargoyles, with a Nurgly vibe to them. The unit was completed at the beginning of the year, under the ols Codex. Nowadays, Gargoyles can actually be given a Mark of Nurgle, so hurray to that.

I changed the unit's concept in mid-work, because I liked the first model with fly wings so much that I decided that every member of the unit should represent some kind of insect. To some varying degree, I think I managed to pull that off.

In a bid to praise father Nurgle, I always try to make my units 7 models strong. With troops choices, this is sadly no longer possible, but it works with Gargoyles just fine.

 The Fly

 The Rust Peacock

  

 The Dragonfly

 The Moth

 The Butterfly

 The Fly-Spawn

 The Hawk Moth

The Maggot, Soulgrinder of Nurgle

Picking up straight from my last post, here is the second miniature that convinced me to go for Nurgle Daemons in the first place. Actually, it wasn't so much a miniature but rather a conversion idea for a miniature. When leafing through a WD one day, I stumbled upon lots of pictures of the Skaven Hell Pit Abomination (HPA), and out of the blue, it simply struck me - this would make a great demonic body for a Nurgle Soulgrinder!

The conversion was really easy to pull off, to my delight. The head was taken from a Brood Howler, a Dark Age mini, as I wanted to go for maggot, not rat, with this one. I also pimped up the mechanical base of the model a lot, just compare it to a regular Grinder. I still think that this is the best conversion of my army, at least up to now. It just really works.

ChainsawDaemonEngines: Yr'ghurarch the Immaculate

Next up on the tour of my daemon army: Yr'ghurarch the Immaculate, Daemon Prince of Nurgle. Incidentally, the Nurgle Daemon Prince model was one of the two models prompting me to collect a Nurgle Daemon army in the first place. Consequently, I did not want to convert it too much, settling for a head swap and modifications to the weapons (chainmace, yeah!). And yes, the wings of course.

Yr'ghurarch the Immaculate, Daemon Prince of Nurgle

Kentaurii of Nurgle

The first two horsemen of decay are finished and are being painted at the moment. I am going for a red/orange/brown scheme and I'll try to give it a very Blanchian vibe... at least that's the plan. You will notice that I have added several modern/SciFi/machine/dieselpunk elements, first because those were rather common in Realm of Chaos and second, because I simply think that's awesome.

Anyway, here are the first two Kentaurii of Nurgle:

#1 'Ratspawn'

#2 'Trollface'

Let me know what you think...

ChainsawDaemonEngines: Carrion Hounds of Nurgle

I'll post pics of the Daemon army I've been working on for the past six months, kicking this off here with my first unit, the Carrion hounds of Nurgle. The theme of this army is that a Slaaneshi Daemon Princess is beaten in a duel by a Nurgle Daemon Prince and must now serve Father Nurgle for the next 7777 years, together with her entourage. Basically, this means I have lots of different units that normally do not feature in a Nurgle Daemon army, each one converted to fit the theme. Mostly, these are Slaaneshi units, but there are the occasional exceptions, like these Flesh Hounds.

I also wanted to emphasize that these are Daemons from the 40K universe, and I wanted to make this obvious by incorporating chainsaws/swords and lots of other mechanical bitz like exhausts. Some people like the fact that Daemon model can almost be used without modification for Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 - and some people do just that - but I wanted to make it very clear that these are Daemons from a Sci-Fi setting.

Alright, here goes.